Weekly Weigh-in (Week 57)

Sunday yet again and time for my weekly weigh-in.

Been an interesting week for me. Spent a lot of it at Disneyland having a great time. Came back to some work, and honestly been one of the better times for that I've had in a while, and now it looks like I might be coming down with a case of something or other. Luckily that should subside soon and leave me to life again.

So, I've been promising some information about my other experiment from January for a while now, so today here it comes.

Based on some information from some of my various research, and an understanding of how thermodynamics works, I decided to experiment with using cold to increase caloric burn. Now a lot of people would have you think that weight is as simple as calories in and calories out. The in is obviously what you eat, the out is the byproducts of that, and all the various expenditures of keeping the body functioning and how much exercise you do etc. Well I've already found that is overly simplistic, what you eat has a big impact how your body fuels itself. Calories are not all created equal. So what else is there to play with? The out of course.

Sure I could exercise a lot and burn more calories that way, but that's a lot of work and a lot of time to burn an appreciable amount of calories. Perhaps there is another way to tinker with the calorie equation. This is where the thermodynamics comes in. The human body has a very small range of core temperature at which it considers itself comfortable. If it's warmer than that you start sweating or doing various other things in an attempt to lower your temp toward that comfortable range, but if it's lower than that your body starts keeping the blood closer in to your core for warmth, and burning more calories to try and generate more heat. This is what we're after. By keeping yourself cooler could you increase your calorie expenditure and burn fat faster than if you were warmer?

This was where I decided to play around a bit. I took it upon myself to try a few methods of keeping my core temp a bit lower to see what kind of results I could garner. At the outset I decided I'd start my morning, after my weigh-in, with a half-liter of ice cold water. This was slightly tricky to execute and as a result I didn't stick with it long, though I feel like if I had the results I saw would have been improved greatly. I stopped even pretending to carry a jacket and just went with the temp as it was. The last thing I did, and the aspect I stuck with that I feel did the most good, was an ice pack applied to the neck and trapezius muscles for 30 minutes every evening, as my research indicated this would be the best place for impacting my core temp and also the best time of day for calorie burn due to increased glucose sensitivity.

So, the testing protocol, the first ten days of January I did no cold application to help ensure that I had a baseline and because I wanted to make sure my testing period happened while I was better acclimated to my dietary experiment for the month. The second ten days of the month I did my 30 minutes of icing each evening. The last ten days I did no icing but kept up the dietary shift to make sure I had accurate information from later on in the same end of that experiment to control for. So, what do the numbers show? The first ten days I lost a total of 4.6 pounds, 3.08 of which were fat and 1.52 of which were lean. During the icing phase I lost 1.7 pounds total, but a total of 4.107 pounds of fat and gained 2.407 of lean. During the last 30 days I lost a net 1 pound, but 2.75 of fat and gained 1.749 of lean. During the first ten days of February when I was back to my more normal diet I gained .4 pounds, having lost 2.342 of fat and gained 2.742 of lean. That's an awful lot of numbers. What do they have to say? I lost nearly twice as much fat during my iced segment than I did during the normal period in February or the latter part of January when I was still doing the Primal experiment. I also gained the second most lean that I gained at any point during this experimental setup.

So, what's the take away from this? The icing helped, and though I didn't test it specifically, I would wager that the icing with the primal eating would do better than either the primal diet or icing with a normal diet would do. So while icing can help increase what you are already doing in terms of burning fat, it's not going to fix anything on it's own. Get your intake taken care of first, and then work on your output, whether that be in the form of exercise, icing, or ideally both. So that's what I have to say about this for now. If you have suggestions on  other things I could experiment with, or ideas on how to improve my testing let me know in the comments.

Well, now that we've seen a bit more of how I went about getting to the weight where I am now, let's see what exactly I am now. 199.6, down .5 from last week. Keeping up in the right neighborhood, and the fat is still slowly but surely coming down. Keeping on with life and thriving in it. Be the you you've always wanted to be, because if you don't you've noone to blame but yourself.